Memento mori
by flecksofpoppy
Summary: Reno has some questions for Vincent Valentine after the end of the world.


So deadcell and I exchanged prompts again, and she gave me a doozy. (Wow, I can't believe I actually just used that word.) The prompts were three phrases, which I (pathetically) didn't use at all-oh, how I tried, but it just didn't work. However, more importantly, the pairing/characters (slash not required) were Vincent Valentine and Reno. Christ. I haven't written Vincent since I was 15 years old, and it boggled my mind trying to come up with some idea as to why they'd actually interact, or what they'd have to talk about, etc. Here is my best effort. For deadcell. ^_^

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><p><strong>Memento mori<strong>

Reno had never liked knowing more than he had to. Information on a not-need-to-know-basis made things complicated and created distractions, and Reno liked things simple. So sifting through files in the Shinra stacks for any hardcopy-only information they had on the new AVALANCHE members was not his idea of a good time.

The Nibelheim incident had its own box. _Tifa Lockhart, civilian: missing. Cloud Strife, PFC: dead._ Of course, if some unduly curious person ever had the brilliant idea to try and cross-reference some of the SOLDIER records with the Nibelheim ones... well, Reno would have yet _another_ problem to follow up on, and it wouldn't involve pushing paper.

_Nanaki; code name, Red XIII: Escaped specimen._

_Barret Wallace: Corel survivor._

_Aeris Gainsborough: Cetra, to be captured on sight._.. Reno didn't even bother looking through that one-too thick, and mostly stuffed full of pages with Tseng's distinctive cursive handwriting scribbled all over them.

_Yuffie Kisaragi: Wutai insurgent._

_Cid Highwind: Former Shinra employee; aeronautics engineer and pilot._ A circular purple sticker next to the file label to signify his involvement in the space program; a black one to signify his "dismissal."

None of this surprised Reno; most people in the world over had some connection back to Shinra. True, he would admit, perhaps not as odd as Cloud Strife and those of his ilk. But other than that...

The last one was Vincent Valentine, a late joiner.

Reno had laughed when he heard the name and had asked Tseng, "Seriously?"

Tseng was preoccupied, not looking at him and rifling around papers with complex diagrams, maps, and the types of floor plans that were only obtainable through radar and didn't have blueprints.

"Yes," he had said.

End of discussion; Reno had just nodded.

_"Valentine, V."_ There it was-another former Shinra employee file with the coded circular stickers.

Reno didn't register what he saw for a moment, blinking. But there it was: a blue sticker: Turk; red: deceased. And a small picture, a snapshot really, yellowed with age.

Tseng had surveyed Reno's blank face placidly when he saw the file. "Put that back," he had said calmly, steepling his fingers, looking at Reno coolly this time, "and never speak of this again." Then he looked down at his desk and closed his eyes, kneading a thumb in between his them. "In fact, shred it. That's an order, Reno."

It was really those colors that spooked Reno. There wasn't much in the file: Vincent's application (dated before Reno was born, or at least before the year Reno had surmised he was _probably_ born), a few standard tests he had passed with flying colors during his training (apparently good with a gun), and a list of his assignments. The last one, Reno noted without actually wanting to even read the paper before he fed it into the shredder, said, "Nibelheim."

Again, it wasn't the name of the town that made Reno pause. He had been there; he had tried to deliver a very important message to Zack Fair. He knew the history better than most other people. It wasn't the name; it was the handwriting. Not the neat, tightly joined cursive letters that Tseng wrote with; no, these words were spidery with loops that were too big and difficult to decipher, but unmistakable.

Hojo. Reno had seen his signature and scrawled notes enough times to know.

He didn't read the details, didn't continue to casually peruse; he dropped the entire manila folder all at once into the shredder.

But he kept the picture. For the first time in his life, he couldn't murder this man, just a face in a faded photograph; but there was too much blue there for Reno to dispose of him completely. So he kept it in his pocket; if Tseng had ever found out he probably would have put a neat, unaffected bullet right through the base of Reno's skull.

Vincent Valentine (or at least his face) survived the apocalypse, the ruination of Midgar, and a plague.

Reno had no idea why he held onto it; he didn't know why he kept a picture of man in his pocket that was supposed to be dead (and wasn't), who used to be a Turk.

In the earlier days at Healen, when he was alone, he'd pull out the picture and talk to it. He'd look into a pair of dark eyes, pour them both two shots of whiskey, and talk.

_"Crazy fuckin' world, huh Valentine?"_ He'd laugh to himself and take his own shot. _Did you know today we found out that Rufus Shinra is going to bite the big one after all?"_

Vincent never said anything back, and usually Reno drank the shotglass of whiskey that he'd positioned in front of the picture at the end of their one-sided conversation.

_"So why'd you join?"_ He'd shake his head. _"You ever regret it?"_

He'd wait, as if Vincent's picture would answer; it never did. _"'Course not,"_ he'd say, as if the same question had been posed back at him, _"not even now. I'm no traitor."_

Later, after Rufus could not longer walk, and half of the world was dying, Reno didn't talk to Vincent's picture anymore. Reno barely spoke to anyone in fact; especially after Tseng and Elena's screams were still echoing in his ears.

Reno would look in the mirror and stare at his own face, imagining what he would look like in a yellowed picture, what he would look like if he was supposed to be dead, forgotten, vanished from the world before it had almost ended.

He would imagine that he was the one who took that picture, 30 years before; he'd imagine what the Turks were like back then. He'd remember the days when there were more than four of them, when bars in Midgar still existed, when they did terrible things.

And he'd remember crashes and keycodes and disintegration. Everything falling down around them, breaking, and even now, in the broken glass of yet another mirror at Healen that wasn't whole, his own spliced reflection.

Vincent didn't look like his picture, Reno decided, after he brought Tseng and Elena back at the eleventh hour. In fact, he looked like a monster. He came and went without much explanation; and then suddenly, the world was healed, the rain was falling.

"What happened?" he had asked Tseng finally, a week after they had returned. Tseng was no longer covered in bandages, and unlike everything else, looked exactly the same as he had before Meteor; at least to Reno's eyes.

"Has anyone ever asked you about your mother, Reno?" Tseng had said levelly, no inflection in his tone. But for some reason, Reno couldn't look him in the eye; it was as uncanny as looking down into a deep pit of which you couldn't see the bottom.

Reno just shrugged. "No."

"What would you say," Tseng said carefully, his stance even and unstrained, yet somehow it still put Reno on edge, "if I asked you to describe your mother in detail, and tell me why you love or hate her?"

After there was no answer, and Reno's eyes were on the floor, Tseng said, "Does that answer your question?" He brushed his fingers over the back of his neck almost absentmindedly; the action was enough to make Reno's stomach bottom out. Tseng didn't do _anything_ "absentmindedly."

After a few moments though, he asked, "Do you know where Valentine hangs out?" He met Tseng's mildly surprised gaze when he finally raised his eyes.

"Ask Strife," Tseng said simply.

Reno didn't take the advice, and instead, simply waited for Vincent to show up at Tifa's bar. He spent a few days staked out in the building across the street, the entire time with Vincent's picture propped against a window sill.

He talked to it through munching on pre-packaged food, through drinking, staring through his sniper's scope day and night. He waited for that strange red flutter, that dark hair he had witnessed only briefly upon Tseng and Elena's return, the ill ease of the surrounding people that saw him.

_"What the hell do you do now?"_ he'd ask. _"Rufus is up and walking again. He's cured. Everyone's cured."_

Other times, he'd take a long drag from a cigarette and blow the smoke out into the stale, still air around them. _"You ever think about what you want?"_ he'd ask, pausing with the cigarette clutched between his fingers, burning down slowly. _"I mean, outside of being a Turk? What the fuck, Vincent? Where the fuck are we right now?"_

Everything smelled like cigarettes after a day, and Reno found himself wondering what Vincent would _smell_ like in that picture, what he did right after it was taken, what he said, who he was with, _what_ he had done in Midgar that night.

Was that man in the picture like Reno? Did he like to drink and only fuck people he paid?

Was he like Rude? Did he keep quiet and just hit things? Were people afraid of him?

Was he like Elena? New, wet behind the ears, but more than competent? Was he trying to prove himself to someone else?

Or was he like Tseng? Reserved, lethal, hidden? Did he keep his hands crossed with dark eyes that hovered between fatigue and resolution?

And Reno knew, somewhere in his saner moments, that he was hiding out in an attic in a building waiting for a man whose picture he'd been carrying for two years to show up.

But there was something he wanted to ask him. _Him:_ the real Vincent Valentine. The one that existed now, in _this_ world, the same way that Reno existed here; not in the past with blood and power and money and _knowing_ who he was. No, _here, _in the midst of monuments and remorse and atonement and broken down clinics with broken down leaders.

He wanted to _know_ what it was like to become a monster without choice, to have different eyes, to have a spliced face and body. He wanted to know how it _felt._

And then the figure in question showed up, a few days later, in the late evening. Went in the back entrance, shut the door quietly behind him, didn't disturb a single resident of Edge with his presence.

Reno was sweaty and stank of stale cigarette smoke. His suit was more wrinkled than normal, creased in strange places, and he made his way slowly down a set of creaky stairs, questioning himself with every step if he really wanted to venture across the street with a picture in his pocket, and talk to the person he'd been having conversations with for the last two years.

He pushed open the door to Tifa's bar and tried to look casual. There was no one there except Cloud and Vincent; Cloud leaning against the side where the liquor was, and Vincent somewhere in between the inside and outside. Tifa was nowhere to be seen.

"Hey," he splayed his hand out pathetically, looking at the floor, "uh...you open?"

Vincent barely spared him a glance, and Cloud just stared at him.

"I mean," he continued, stopping at the far end of the bar away from where Cloud and Vincent were standing, "are you serving _booze_?"

"Sure," Cloud finally muttered. "What do you want?"

Reno slowly adjusted to the social world again; spending two days inside of a cramped attic with a picture of a supposedly dead man and 5 packs of cigarettes never did much for anyone's self awareness.

"Whiskey," he replied. He wished, right then, that another Turk was there; Rude most of all, Elena as a second, and Tseng as a distant third. Anyone at all, there, with him.

Cloud bent down and looked under the bar, and frowned.

"Fine," he said, a grimace in his voice that he didn't show. Reno knew the only reason that Cloud was indulging him was that Tifa always served them; and Cloud didn't generally deviate from standards that Tifa set.

Of course (and it was obvious to even Reno), if Cloud had ever expressed displeasure at Reno's presence, Tifa would just as happily put him into an early grave. Cloud hadn't quite caught onto that one yet, so Reno regularly used it to his full advantage.

"I'll be right back," Cloud said, and disappeared into the back.

Then it was just the two of them; Vincent at one end, and Reno at the other.

Reno drummed his fingers nervously on the bar; Vincent didn't even look at him, simply stared into space in a way that made him appear as if he were merely contemplating the universe, quite content to be by himself.

"So uh..." Reno started, and pulled out a cigarette. "You uh...saved Tseng and Elena?"

That caught Vincent's attention; Reno thanked any god that might be listening that he had bought a new pack of cigarettes _before _this encounter.

"Yes," Vincent acknowledged, and finally turned those red eyes on Reno. Reno just stared back.

"Uh..." he fumbled with the pack of cigarettes as he packed them against the bar, hitting the sticky wooden surface with a loud, sharp _tap tap tap _that seemed to be like a sin in the muted bar, and finally popped it open. "Yeah...I wanted to say thanks," he finished lamely.

He pulled out a cigarette more nimbly than he had opened the pack and lit it smoothly; it was an action as practiced as his heartbeat.

"They're still making those?" Vincent asked after a moment as the scent of smoke rose up all around them.

Reno laughed weakly. "Guess so," he said quietly. "Uh...been smokin' them since I was 13."

"You're from Midgar?" Vincent guessed, taking two steps forward and resting a hand on the bar. A _hand..._not whatever it was that was hanging heavily in the layers of his clothes. Reno stared at it; Vincent's hands weren't visible in his picture from his Shinra file. It was pale.

"Yeah," he said, shrugging. "Why, you want one?"

The question took Vincent off guard; he looked at Reno with something like a warning on his face. But when Reno just looked at him in genuine confusion, he relented, and calmed his expression.

"No thank you," he replied. "I don't smoke anymore."

"You used to smoke these? I mean...when you did?" Reno asked curiously.

Vincent hesitated for a moment. His eyes darted toward the doorway to what was presumably the backroom where Cloud had disappeared; then he looked back at Reno.

"Yes," he said, more softly, "in fact, I did."

"Didn't know they'd been around that long," Reno commented absently, as if it were the most obvious observation in the world. Something in Vincent's face ticced.

"How old do you think I am?" he asked, and suddenly, he was very close, and Reno could feel the lack of body heat from him. He shivered.

"Dunno," he replied, taking a long drag and blowing it in the opposite direction, if only to get his face away from Vincent's gaze. "How old do you think _I _am?"

Vincent didn't answer, the stare intensified; Reno never _could_ resist a fight.

"_What?_" he asked, finally turning his gaze to face Vincent. "What the fuck do you want?"

"What do _you _want," Vincent replied, "I think is the more pertinent question."

"Who the fuck _are_ you?" Reno finally blurted out. "You're part of..." he hissed, then jabbed at the doorway where Cloud had disappeared, "..._them_ now. You're no fucking Turk. But then you save Tseng...and Elena...and...what the fuck-"

Vincent grabbed Reno's collar with the metal arm, and Reno swallowed nervously as he felt cold, sharp joints poking against his neck. Then Vincent's grip tightened and he lifted Reno a full inch off the ground without any visible exertion, staring him right in the eyes. Red stacked on blue stacked on yellow metal.

"You _do _know that you're a relic?" Vincent said calmly. "Do you not?" But there was something in his face that unsettled Reno enough to shut up and just gasp for breath.

"'Least I'm not a fucking remnant," he croaked, and Vincent let him go.

He crumpled to the ground, fighting for air, gasping.

"Mother _fucker_," he hissed. "What the fuck?"

"Yes you are," Vincent replied, taking a step back and letting Reno try and get his breath back. "Just as much as I am."

"I'm not a _monster_," Reno finally choked out, staring up at Vincent. And right about then, they both looked their respective ages; something in Vincent's face changed.

"You're right," he said softly, "I _am _a monster. Both now in appearance and in deeds. But so are you."

Reno just sucked in air and propped himself up on the bar, leaning heavily against it.

"What do you think makes me a monster?" Vincent asked. "This?" he motioned to his eyes, to his body, the claw that had replaced his arm, "Or that?" he said, and pointed at Reno's suit. "When? When did I become a monster?"

"When Hojo made you one?" Reno whispered, and reached into his pocket. He felt it there; the sharp edges, the brittle paper.

"This," he said, pulling it out, pushing it into Vincent's face. "This was you. This...is you?"

"No," Vincent said. But he took the picture into his hand, his real hand, gently, and stared into the past. "Yes," he corrected after a few moments, lost in his own thoughts, "at some point."

And then Reno felt like time had slowed down, as Vincent took his own photograph and crushed it between his fingers. It practically turned to dust, the stiff paper cracking, the cracks turning into tears and the tears into irreparable destruction. And then it was gone, just a few flakes of dust.

"_No_."

There was the word. There were Vincent's eyes, staring, actually surprised for the first time in a long time, as Reno dropped his head and shook it, his hands shaking.

Vincent looked at him, looked at the dust in his hand, and then back at Reno. The hair falling in his face, the cigarette, the downcast expression, the shaking, the lost history.

He moved close; Reno didn't say anything, and he pulled the other man against him. Reno didn't protest; simply pressed his face against Vincent's chest, since he was allowed to.

"Veld," Vincent finally said softly, as Reno pushed his entire body against him, hiding, "was around the same time as me. You ever know him?"

"Yeah," Reno shuddered finally. "I did."

"Well," Vincent said, and let his human hand rest on Reno's shoulder. "You want to hear a story about why Veld never used a gun after meeting me?" And there may have been a small smile in Vincent's voice.

Reno let out a sound; his shoulders shook, and Vincent just kept his hand where it was.

"Yeah," he finally whispered, "I do."


End file.
